Ayatollah Ruhollah Moosavi Khomeini was an Iranian religious leader, a revolutionary, a politician, and the leader of the 1979 Iranian Revolution which overthrow Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who was the Shah of Iran at the time. Born on September 24, 1902, Ruhollah Mousavi, whose name means "inspired of God", was a member of a family of Shi'ite religious scholars in a small Iranian village, called Khomein. He would later be named by his hometown and become more famous by the name Ruhollah Khomeini. In the 1950s he was acclaimed as an ayatollah, i.e. major religious leader, and by the early 1960s he received the famous title of grand ayatollah, making him one of the supreme religious leaders of Iran. [1] Ayatollah Khomeini became the supreme religious leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979, after many years of resistance to the Shah Pahlavi. Following his appointment as Ayatollah, Khomeini’s main goal was to remove the Shah from power for his associations with the West, who was considered the enemy at the time. Upon the success of the revolution Khomeini was named as the political and religious leader of Iran for eternity of his life. [2] Surprisingly, Khomeini did not …show more content…
He persuaded the other senior marja’s of Qom to make a boycott of the referendum that the Shah had thought to obtain for the appearance of popular approval for his White Revolution. Khomeini issued on January 22, 1963 a strongly written declaration denouncing the Shah and his goals. Two days later Shah made an armored column to Qom, and he delivered a speech strongly attacking the Ulema. Reza Shah transformed the Iranian monarchy into a modern autocracy. The modern programs of restricted and limited religious life and made clergies be against the monarchy, as well, and Khomeini decided to go in conflict with them and build another state adhering to religious rules.